When Airbnb ran into business permit problems in Grand Rapids, Michigan or when a neighborhood council threatened to ban Airbnb in Silver Lake, California, it was Peers that rallied Airbnb hosts to lobby councilors on the company’s behalf. When Seattle City Council decided that Lyft and Uber were breaking taxi regulations, it was Peers that mobilized supporters to sign petitions. And these efforts were not in vain: they succeeded in getting councils to back down, and in one of the organization’s most important victories they got the state of California to recognize a new category of transit organization called “Transportation Network Companies,” which created a framework within which Lyft, Uber, Sidecar, and others could operate legally, and which has been imitated in several other states since.
In the summer of 2014, Peers listed 75 partner organizations on its web site, and the list gives a snapshot of the Sharing Economy landscape as it hit the mainstream. Spanish company Gudog is “a platform that brings together dog owners and trustworthy dog sitters”; with BoatBound you can “find the perfect boat with or without a captain”; if you prefer eating to boating, you can go to Cookening, a web site where “your host cooks and shares a meal with you, at his or her place.”

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The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition
by
David Levinson,
Kevin Krizek

During the long transition, those who cannot afford such cars may come to be vilified as the cause of crashes.
——
While people, animals, weather, larger cargo needs, and so on are still potential confounding factors, autonomous vehicles interacting with only autonomous vehicles should be much easier to design and manage than autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic.
The next chapter considers how Transport Network Companies such as Lyft and Uber compete with taxis. But with their added labor, such services are too expensive for most people for frequent mobility.173 In contrast, autonomous vehicles total costs will be significantly lower, making it feasible that larger numbers of people replace their personal car (which is parked 23 out of 24 hours) with one that comes on-demand.
Discussion: Thought Experiment: "Ze Car, Ze Car."

…

The car-shedding question remains: how many households will surrender a second (or first) car for the occasional trip?185 Is the market thick enough that the likelihood of finding a car nearby is high enough that it is reliable enough to use? With Car2Go there is no guarantee there will be a car within walking distance. Efforts to rebalance the fleet can be costly. This is where other services (taxi, transport network companies, transit) come in as backups. This is also where autonomous vehicles can be important.
Nevertheless, people prefer not to think about every transaction. If they are charged per use, they use less. But they are less happy and more determined to get a car of their own to avoid transaction costs. Cars of course have costs of their own, but they are less frequent and less obvious. If the charges are invisible though, people may not think about them.

…

In contrast with traditional taxis, the passenger sits shotgun (in the front row passenger seat), and is expected to have a conversation with the driver (which happens in some taxis, though not always). Anecdotally, it appears people who drive for Lyft are more likely to be (though not universally) American citizens or long-term residents, and since they own their own car, less likely to be poor, recently landed immigrants who comprise the taxi drivers in many cities.
Lyft is in many ways simply an app with a back-end (rather, 'cloud-based') dispatch service. They claim to be a "transport network company whose mobile-phone application facilitates peer-to-peer ridesharing by enabling passengers who need a ride to request one from drivers who have a car." They insist the drivers are independent (as are the riders). The difference between this and a taxi dispatcher is thin. A taxi is "a car licensed to transport passengers in return for payment of a fare, usually fitted with a taximeter."190 So for taxicabs, the arrangement between the rider and the passenger is mediated by the government (which licenses the vehicles).

Unless this inherent information asymmetry was overcome, the market for person-to-person rides would never take off.
But by March of 2016, Uber was handling 50 million rides per month in the United States. The great majority of Uber’s ride suppliers were not professional chauffeurs; they were simply people who wanted to make money with their labor and their cars.
So how did this huge market overcome severe information asymmetries? In 2013, California passed regulations mandating that transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft conduct criminal background checks on their drivers. These checks certainly provided some reassurance, but they were not the whole story. After all, UberX and its competitor Lyft both grew rapidly before background checks were in place, and by August 2016, BlaBlaCar still did not require them for its drivers.
Instead, these companies used their platforms’ user interfaces to overcome the information asymmetries that plagued their markets.

First, an SRO must establish credibility early on through its performance. Second, self-regulatory actors must demonstrate strong enforcement capabilities. Third, SROs must be perceived as legitimate and independent. And finally, an SRO must take advantage of participants’ reputational concerns and social capital.26
The state of California has pioneered a self-regulatory approach for one sector of the sharing economy, through the creation of Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) in 2013. As described in detail by Catherine Sandoval, the commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), at the 2015 Federal Trade Commission workshop about the sharing economy, this represents an interesting partnership between government and sharing economy platforms. Here’s how it works. The CPUC has defined a set of standards that drivers of smartphone-based point-to-point urban transportation vehicles (taxis) need to conform to.

Competitors like Sidecar (launched January of 2012) and Lyft (founded summer of 2012 as an extension of an earlier city-to-city ridesharing service known as Zimride) noticed the potential upside for a business that could extract revenue from travelers without actually investing in anything as expensive as buses, trains, or even cars; all that they needed were software algorithms and marketing. Though the California Public Utilities Commission, under pressure from existing taxi services, shut them all down, it allowed them to reopen the following year as what the state of California now calls “Transportation Network Companies.”
Uber, by far the biggest kid on the ridesharing block, expanded to Paris, Toronto, and London in 2012, and hasn’t looked back. By 2015 you could download the Uber app to your smartphone and request an Uber pickup in more than two hundred cities in forty-five countries.e This kind of growth attracts all sorts of attention. USA Today picked Uber as their “tech company of the year” in 2013, and venture capitalists have invested so much in the company that, as of the end of 2014, it had a valuation somewhere north of $40 billion.

A future with autonomous vehicles, delivery drones, and unified payment systems is on the near-term horizon. This wave of change has landed on our streets, and these changes will advance how we get around cities and use our streets. A smartphone can eliminate the anxiety of getting around, whether you’re in Boston, Bangalore, or Buenos Aires.
But these new apps also pose big questions. While new transportation services like Uber and Lyft (called transportation network companies or TNCs in transport-speak), or shared-vehicle services like Car2Go, Zipcar, and Bridj, are using technology to dramatically lower the operating and entry costs for taxi and car services, they raise questions about social equity, safety, and the true costs of these popular services. Without a regulatory framework, cities could see outcomes that run counter to goals of mobility, sustainability, accessibility, and social equity.

They soon launched Air Mattress Bed & Breakfast, later Airbnb.
Airbnb is among the most successful of the shared-economy companies. Unlike many traditional businesses, shared-economy companies have no single base of customers. Rather, these companies provide two-sided markets that connect sellers (or people with something to share) with buyers (who are willing to pay for the product or service)—like the transportation-network company Lyft, which connects passengers who need a ride to drivers who have a car, and TaskRabbit, an errand-outsourcing company that connects people who need something done with “taskers” who will do the job. For Airbnb, it’s connecting local residents with room to spare and travelers who need a place to stay. To grow, shared-economy companies have to keep both sides of the market—sellers and buyers—happy.

When a group of Uber drivers assembled outside the company’s headquarters to protest their firing, the company’s general manager said that the drivers weren’t employees and that, when they were fired, it simply amounted to deactivating the drivers’ accounts. The given reason? Low ratings from passengers. This insouciance is built into Uber, which calls itself a software company, or alternatively, a transportation network company, rather than a taxi company. (Sidecar identifies as a peer-to-peer ride-sharing service.) Uber is also known for flouting local laws by setting up business in a new city without speaking to officials responsible for managing the transport sector.
There’s a great deal of unacknowledged work involved in the sharing economy. Drivers have to keep their cars clean and insured, with no help from the company nominally employing them.

pages: 504words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by
Fredrik Erixon,
Bjorn Weigel

But it has been forced to take a crash course in the political and legal grammar of innovation, because it has faced mounting opposition from competitors, trade unions, and authorities. Its opponents are calling for it to be either forced out of business or regulated to make it behave and operate just like every other taxi firm it competes with.
As you might have guessed, the company in question is Uber – the San Francisco-based transport network company offering services via an app. UberPop, its peer-to-peer car-sharing service using unlicensed drivers, closed in France following the men’s arrest and all the protests against the service. Trade unions had taken strike action in protest against Uber, and some of them became violent. They burnt tires and aggressively harassed Uber drivers and their passengers. Parisian police authorities had previously tried to slow the company’s expansion by ruling that taxis could not turn up sooner than 15 minutes after the booking had been made.

pages: 373words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by
Brad Stone

Zafar agreed and threw the driver out of the auditorium.
The decision by the five PUC commissioners on the ridesharing companies was ultimately unanimous. Under Michael Peevey’s influential direction, and with letters of support from Mayor Ed Lee in San Francisco and Mayor Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles, Peevey and the four other commissioners voted to formally legalize ridesharing, classified the firms as “transportation network companies,” and said they would revisit the ruling in a year. The new rules required the companies to, among other things, report the average number of hours and miles each driver spent on the road every year—a requirement Uber would subsequently ignore, racking up millions in fines.27 It also reiterated that the companies were required to hold a million dollars in supplemental insurance to cover drivers, but only while passengers were in their car—a provision that was soon shown to be tragically inadequate.28
Nevertheless, the ruling legitimized the TNCs and gave them ammunition for coming legal fights in other states and countries.